A devious idea

February 05, 2008

From Newsday If you've ever stood in the cold, sucking smoke into your lungs to get your fix of nicotine, or if you've ever walked through those toxic clouds to enter or exit a building, you know the addictive power of nicotine. So do the tobacco executives. Their latest idea is a shorter, more potent smoke that will dose you faster and get you back inside to work. The new cigarette is Marlboro Intense. The chief executive of Philip Morris International was proudly smoking one of them for a Wall Street Journal story this week about its new products and strategies. Right now, it's available in Turkey, but don't be surprised if it turns up in this country too. In the United States, Philip Morris tries to portray itself as a responsible company that will somehow both sell you cigarettes and help you quit smoking. At the same time, however, it is spinning off Philip Morris International as a separate company from the parent Altria Group, to gain more flexibility in lucrative, wide-open foreign markets. not including ours, a major tobacco power. One thing we can do here is urge Congress to pass long-pending legislation to allow the FDA to regulate nicotine. That's the only way to defend against Philip Morris' bringing to the United States some of the death-dealing innovations that it's trying out overseas. Without real regulation, too many Americans will succumb to the lethal addiction-sellers.